Pearla premieres new music, debut EP out September 6 on Egghunt Records

Spread the love EP release show in Brooklyn, NY on August 28 at Rough Trade Pearla has released the second offering from her upcoming debut EP Quilting & Other Activities out September 6 on Egghunt Records (Lucy Dacus, Camp Howard). The FADER premiered “Quilting” alongside a full interview with the emerging Brooklyn songstress. They write “Listening...

EP release show in Brooklyn, NY on August 28 at Rough Trade

Pearla has released the second offering from her upcoming debut EP Quilting & Other Activities out September 6 on Egghunt Records (Lucy Dacus, Camp Howard). The FADER premiered “Quilting” alongside a full interview with the emerging Brooklyn songstress. They write “Listening to the intricately-produced and whimsical folk songs on Rodriguez’s record — released under the name Pearla — can feel like re-encountering artifacts lost to time: beautiful and sweet, but with a nagging edge of something gone wrong … Rodriguez’s visceral, haunting worlds are definitely worth the trip.” Read the full feature here.

“Quilting” follows “Daydream” which Bob Boilen of NPR All Songs Considered hailed as “music worth getting lost in … stunning, ethereal, beautiful” and precedes an EP release show at Rough Trade in Brooklyn, NY on August 28, with special guests Belle-Skinner and Renata Zeiguer. Pearla recently performed intimate sessions for Daytrotter and The Wild Honey Pie, and will visit the Paste Magazine studios on August 27 at 2:30 PM EST.

At only 23 years of age, Nicole Rodriguez is an exceptionally precocious songwriter, shining radiant light upon resonant human experiences in every song. She says of today’s release: “Quilting is about attachment and the addictive nature of comfort. It’s about coming out of a fog and facing yourself for the first time after spending too long wrapped up in others. For me, those first moments alone after the end of a relationship were unbearable, and I found myself reaching out arbitrarily just for the sake of having something to hold or something to do. The song is about me having this belief that I should be enough for myself, but not being able to fully realize it.”

Pearla is Nicole Rodriguez, a Brooklyn songstress blending mystical twinges of folk, pop and psychedelia into one warm and gently serrating, sonic experience. Her music is discovered in the same way one might a childhood toy trunk, a storied treasure chest, or a beloved jewelry box. It is a strangely familiar universe — at once, able to be endlessly explored and lovingly held in your hand; at once, emotionally expansive and exquisitely contained.

Pearla’s debut EP Quilting & Other Activities was written and co-produced by Nicole Rodriguez, co-produced and arranged by Tyler Postiglione (Rektagon, Strange Loops), mixed by Phil Joly (The Strokes, Lana Del Rey) and mastered by Sarah Register (The Shins, Big Thief). On it, Pearla situates folk structures like outlines in a coloring book and then, with the bewildering spirit of a child and the volatile mind of a grown being, begins to scribble. Her vocal performance is dynamic at least, manic at most — a celestial whisper into howling emotional hemorrhage into cartoonish melody into gauzy lullaby. She fills the songs with life forms — a yellow bird, a gray flower, a souvenir starfish — transforming every emotion into a living creature. Stray noises collected from all corners of the world — Tibetan sheep bells, screaming baboons, lap steels, synths — wriggle around her creations with unpredictable ease. The result is more texture than genre, something listeners can truly feel.